Post

stained hanes

Dec 29 • 56 tweets • 20 min read • Read on X

If poverty leads to crime, then how come Appalachia has a lower crime rate than the national average?

Let's take a look:

https://twitter.com/718Tv/status/1740841928005177838

Atrocity tourism only works one-way and some who can't get enough of it 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 to gawk at people living in grinding, hope destroying poverty as long as they're not white

They'd probably laugh if you mention the white ghettos in South Africa

https://twitter.com/718Tv/status/1740841928005177838

Shoutouts to @ARCgov for their incredible work in detailing this catastrophe that people do their best to avoid discussing or even thinking about at all

@ARCgov What comes to mind when you think of the word "poverty"?

Now remove subsidized vouchers paying for modern forced Central Air (HVAC) with which to set at 85F in the dead of winter paid for by tax payers, running water and electricity. Add stoves that run on wood or coal for heat

@ARCgov No government supplied vouchers are sent to Appalachian families to burn said wood either

Don't cut wood = no heat

Not many Section 8 vouchers either for that matter in this neck of the woods. No WIC checks, no EBT cards either

@ARCgov Owsley County, Clay County, Knox County and McCreary County in Kentucky

Or Wilcox and Sumter County in Alabama

Or Quitman County in Mississippi

All synonymous with "slow motion catastrophe" and "entire communities disintegrating" but no one ever talks about it

@ARCgov I always wondered where the reflexive disdain for "white trash" comes from, it often comes from people who've never hung out or partied with them

There's a city/country whites point to be made here, among others. Now that fentanyl entered the server everyone forgot about this

@ARCgov Truly, if anything is systemic, it is the living Hell that make up the lives in Appalachia

RW culture war guys don't like to talk about it cause they're poor. LW culture war guys hate them cause they're white and mock them in ways that defy proper description

Discussing places like Appalachia (or the Ozarks, for example) invoke grinding poverty on American soil so hardly anyone does it

Class is an underpinning of culture yet avoided by the right and grossly misunderstood on the left but through a lens of hating white people

The Mennonites have done more to alleviate the suffering here than the Federal Government and never asked for anything in return. Think about that for a moment

Moonshiners? Sure. Criminals? Of course, they're everywhere. Hilljack scrappers tearing copper wiring out of buildings before the sun comes up? Yup

And yet there is an astonishing lack of gang activity from the people living here, and the crime rate is below the national average

Interestingly enough, there are non-whites who live in abject misery that left wing of culture war avoids mentioning entirely

Indian reservations are home to astonishingly fucked up living conditions. Guess they better start transitioning to get some eyes and ears on them, too

There are numerous factors as to why this is. A declining coal industry, out-of-state corporate interests, drugs (as if someone wants them there, wild how opiates claimed so, so, so many lives in this area), but there's gotta be something else behind it. Right?

Some posit its dey cultcha. In a more developed form, the culture of poverty explanation also informs J.D. Vance’s argument in Hillbilly Elegy, which he describes as a book about a “culture that increasingly encourages social decay” in the context of regional economic decline

Others suggest the “resource curse,” or the idea that places with a lot of natural resources are likely to be poorer because resource industries, like coal mining, dominate the local economy and prevent other economic sectors from growing

Just like swaths of the third world

Almost sixty years ago, it was just slightly less fucked up as it is today. Hard to imagine that politicians used to openly talk about this mess

Even harder to imagine people acting on their convictions and do something about it on their own volition

Although the culture of poverty and resource curse explanations provide very different stories for why Appalachia is poor, they are similar insofar as they present Appalachia’s poverty as a straightforward, apolitical problem to be solved. As they are most often presented, both

the culture of poverty and resource curse just seem to exist - natural problems of the mountains waiting to be fixed by the government, NGOs, or whoever else

As they are most often presented, both the culture of poverty and resource curse just seem to exist - natural problems of

the mountains waiting to be fixed by the government, NGOs, or whoever else There’s little room in these theories for history, politics, or the ongoing struggles to control Appalachia’s resources

Without a doubt, the most popular of the critical theories is the internal colony

model. Developed in the 1970s to provide a political explanation for Appalachia’s poverty, the internal colony model likens the region's relationship to the rest of America to that of a colony with its colonizer. Under this theory, out-of-state companies came into the region to

In part because it taps into Appalachia’s deep history of labor conflict, the internal colony model remains a popular explanation among activists fighting against the idea that Appalachia is “naturally” poor. However, the theory has also drawn criticism and for good reason

For one, in comparing Appalachia to historic colonies like India and many African countries, the internal colony model tends to hide the fact that the region’s European inhabitants did in fact colonize it from Native Americans. Additionally, in presenting a homogenous, victimized

Appalachia, the theory can erase important differences within the region

It also removes the entrenched local elite. Like most culture war guys they can't be bothered and are desperate to stay invisible enough to not let on how oblivious they are to things just a few miles away

You'd figure that of all people, the living examples of physiognomy gone wrong who've never went a day without would point out the obvious like

“Seventy to 90 percent of land in some counties is still absentee or corporate land, and a lot of the coal and timber companies leased

their land from these companies. Harvard University actually still has a chunk of land. It’s the connection between this land grab and local gatekeepers that’s important” said no culture war guy ever

Its a shame, they have platforms and choirs they preach too who'd listen

Its not just the sissies brimming with macho insecurity, hiding behind Greek statue pfps but look like bike seat sniffers out of a sex offender lineup from a 90s sitcom and their inability to affect change in meatspace

Poverty in 2021 looks different than in 1964 – but the US

hasn’t changed how it measures who’s poor since LBJ began his "war on poverty" which has been just as effective as "the war on drugs"

In Mark Robert Rank's 'Confronting Poverty' he details, among other things, how the approach that the government came up with in the 1960s is

still - despite its many shortcomings - the government’s official measure of poverty and used to determine eligibility for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid

This is serious, and warrants attention not just for the issues in Appalachia but from coast to coast

Broadly speaking, poverty means not having the money to purchase the basic necessities to maintain a minimally adequate life, such as food, shelter and clothing

The government came up with its official method for counting poor people in the mid-1960s

First, it asks, what does

it cost to purchase a minimally adequate diet during the year for a particularly sized family? That number is then multiplied by three, and you have arrived at the poverty line. That’s it

If a family’s income falls above the line it is not considered in poverty, while those

third of its income on food and the remaining two-thirds on all other expenses

Therefore, the logic was that if a minimally adequate diet could be purchased for a particular dollar amount, multiplying that figure by three would give the amount of income needed to purchase the

basic necessities for a minimally adequate life

Back in 1963, that translated into a poverty line of US$3,128 for a family of four. In 2019, the same family’s poverty line stood at $26,172. For an interesting contrast, that’s less than half what the average American polled in

2013 said was the “smallest amount of money” a family of four needed to get by, or $58,000

The federal government adjusts the poverty line annually to reflect increases in the cost of living. The cutoff itself varies by the number of people in the household, while a household’s

annual income is based upon the earnings of everyone currently residing within it

Using this measure, 10.5% of the U.S. population was in poverty in 2019, the most recent data available

Keep in mind, though, these thresholds represent impoverishment at its most opulent level

Among those living below the poverty line, 45% live in “deep” poverty, which means they live on less than half of the official poverty line

The government uses the official poverty line as the base to determine who’s eligible for a range of social programs, from Medicaid to the

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. For example, to qualify for SNAP, a household must be below 130% of the poverty line for its size

So, in other words, its not THE reason but A reason why shit is fucked is how the gubmint counts the poor

But Appalachia is a part of The

United States, and while poverty isn't delegated to just one region the issue of miscounting the poor lends itself to this astonishingly fucked up ordeal that for most people who don't live there just fades into the background

Uh oh, there goes that word again. "Poor"

Can't post le ebin maymays about something like that. Nothing you can keep on your phone when it comes up so you can wallow in the crapulence of "haha, I posted it again!"

So its no surprise Appalachia, among other topics often avoided entirely, is a no-go zone for both sides of

culture war

You can't fix a problem you're not allowed to talk about, so callous indifference for one's fellow Americans can easily be masked by silence

If Appalachia can see resolve, then the rest of the country has more than a pipedream of unfucking itself

The hypothetical worse of "it can always be worse" is basically Appalachia. If it were ever anything other than what it is today, then there's no excuse why elsewhere can't improve

Its hard here in America, but they've always had it worse. Speaking of America, that's something

culture war guys on both sides get wrong as if by design. Yes, I know its fun to poke fun at the mincing dandyfops on the right with their Tonka Tuff super huge tough lord macho escapism LARP as much as its fun to laugh at the left with their inability to wrap

their warped minds around concepts like "society dictates language, its not the other way around no matter how much you tweet and scream and insist" or wealth being the one true privilege (although the right excels at sidestepping this truth, but for different reasons). But

there is abundant room for improvement in Appalachia, and in a way its a sad microcosm of these United States

Incremental improvement happens at the local level, but it is the least sexy or exciting thing in the world to discuss compared to whatever passes as news these days

People can, and should, take their cue from Appalachia. People who enacted change there got up off their ass and left no stone unturned because as pointed out earlier - a buncha Mennonites did more than the fucking government as a whole

No one is coming for them, they know this

One day we'll strive towards a more perfect union as laid out in the preamble of the constitution. Despite some drastic shortcomings and weird blind spots in what resembles "discourse" these days - of all the sinking ships in the world ours is the best

God Bless America

So let's round this out with some fancy book learnin' so you can walk away with some context to one of the most beautiful and tragic corners of these United States

I'd like to thank @HillbillyPixie for putting me on to some (most) of these:

digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewconten…